Oh, I'm sorry. Did you people think I was joking?

#StarTrekDiscovery #StarTrekGifs #StarTrekDiscoveryGifs

Know how I said that I was going to end up being so annoyed that I was going to start making Star Trek: Discovery gifs?

Check Tenor in about a week. Working on Episode 2 now.

#StarTrekGifs #StarTrek #StarTrekDiscovery

*cracks knuckles*

Now we'll see about those #startrekgifs.

If any software engineer types are looking for a project around #HangTrek or #SarlaccPit, I’d love to be able to have a scoreboard. I was thinking you could write a script in Python or whatever your language of choice is & then crawl through the Solved toots. A simple start would be just to list a running total of how many puzzles each player has solved. You can get fancier by tracking how many rounds each solution took, who the host was, etc.

I was thinking it might be easier to start with the #startrekgifs game, which is automated, so there is less variation to deal with. Everything comes from one account. And so on. In the word games, there are different hosts & each one does things a little differently, so digging out the information might be a little trickier. The GIF game keeps its own scoreboard, but I wouldn’t mind seeing some different stats, like a summary of each week in addition to the running totals the bot publishes.

Food for thought.

@deusfigendi

File this among possible minor improvements.

Sometimes because of idiosyncrasies of the Fediverse, the winning reply is not replicated out to all instances. In these cases, I sometimes have to dig to see if a puzzle has already been solved, by whom & what the answer was. I can see a reply from @startrekgifs saying “[c],” but the original post isn’t boosted because it’s not available on my instance. I can see the mention in your reply. I cannot see the solution toot in the replies to the original, even after it’s boosted. I have to open the original on the web from the host instance (“Open original page”). Or if I can see the poster’s profile in a different UI, I can go to their replies & dig out the winning guess.

It occurs to me we have a similar situation in the word games (Hang Trek & Sarlacc Pit), though in fact worse, since it’s more decentralized (no single account posts the puzzles). Sometimes players guess privately, though I try to discourage that. Every puzzle ends, however, with a solution toot from the host, which includes the correct answer and credit to the winning player (along with the albatross of hosting the next round). It also tends to hang directly off of a poll toot, so there’s never a missing intermediate toot because of failure to replicate across instances. If you can see the original poll, you can see the solution & it’s easy to find.

I was thinking you could do something similar:

1. Reply to the original puzzle post instead of (or in addition to) the winning reply.
2. Include an @ to credit the winner.
3. Include the correct answer (title, ep no, whatever).

With the word games, #3 is easier, since there’s exactly one correct answer. In your case, you accept a lot of different formats, even multiple languages. So you could end up with “The Trouble With Tribbles,” “Kennen Sie Tribbles?” or “TOS 2x15,” etc. I suppose you could just echo back whatever the winner posted. Or you could have a standardized answer or even a link to Memory Alpha or IMDb or something.

So it’s probably more than a little work for something that’s not a huge problem. But it might make things clearer. Food for thought, at least.

#startrekgifs